A very nice surprise came into my mailbox today as I discovered Ecpc has almost reached the Top Ten of the Handango People’s Choice Awards in the category Best Education Solution!
The Handango People’s Choice Awards are designed to honor those applications that offer customers the best quality available in the mobile software world. Handango Members have the opportunity to vote for their favorite software in numerous categories.
Need to say more? I’m simply amazed I’ve reached the 11th place in such a short time frame, so first of all I’d like to thank the kind people who cast their vote for Ecpc.
Handango has just reopened voting for next year’s People’s Choice Awards and the next group of winners will be announced in March 2004, so if you really like Ecpc now you know exactly what to do: just go to the bottom of the Product details page and vote it in the Best Education Solution category.
The next time we‘ll do much better than the 11th place, won’t we?

Those of you interested in getting started in the development of Pocket PC applications, and in particular who sent me an e-mail asking “I’ve downloaded the Embedded Visual Tools, now what?”, will be very happy to know that I’m writing an introductory, but exhaustive, tutorial about Pocket PC development for the Best Tutorial Contest hosted by #GameProg-Ita, the best Italian resource for wanna be game developers.
Here’s the abstract of the tutorial:
“The purpose of the tutorial will be to provide to the wanna be developer of entertainment software for the handheld platform Pocket PC, the basic concepts related to the distinctive features of such platform, to the available development tools and programming languages, in particular the Microsoft’s Embedded Visual Tools and the related SDKs, including the small GAPI (Game API) library, which contains the functions to access the hardware at low level, something fundamental for any game of medium complexity.
It will also be included a brief analysis of the Pocket PC software market, and the opportunities this new mobile platform offers to independent developers.”
I hope this will be my little contribution to the small Italian game development community, but not only for them, since once the contest will be over I’ll translate the tutorial in English and I’ll publish it here on my website.
As if I hadn’t enough work to do on my projects, the deadline for the contest is the 15th October… but I’ll make it!

Today Frédéric Botton, Chef de projet of the French PDA Magazine, has kindly sent me a scan of the article about Ecpc appeared in the September-October issue of his magazine.
As you can see in the picture below, I’ve sort of censored the URL address pointing to the French Special Demo of Ecpc which I build for his readers, since it’s currently hosted on my website and at the moment I can’t afford bandwidth problems. So if you want it you have to buy a copy of PDA Magazine.
A couple of notes: the price in the article refers to the first promotional version of Ecpc and the French Special Demo has already been updated to the latest version 1.1.
The standard Demo version of Ecpc should have been included also in the Cover Disk of the current issue of the British magazine PDA Essentials, but I’ve not been able to get any confirmation of that so far.
Update: Ecpc appeared on the Cover CD of issue 16 of PDA Essentials with a review in the CD pages also. Now I can’t wait to get a copy of the magazine!
Have a nice weekend!

I’m a developer and not certainly a web designer, so I was pleased to receive the tips by Quintin Riis, a young web designer from the USA, in particular about the weird way I used JavaScripts to open the external links in a new browser window. Now I’ve changed all the external links, but feel free to alert me if something doesn’t work properly on your browser.
I’ve just added a new great feature in the Wishlist, the compare collections feature, which will be included in the next version of Ecpc since I’m already working on it.
Finally I’ve uploaded the collection file of Mariano in the swapping page. His swap list file should be soon ready.

Most probably the German translation of Ecpc will be the first one to be released since now two people are working on it, including a nice new German user from Hamburg, Heiko Heubach, who not only purchased a regular copy of the program, but also offered me his help for the translation!
He also has a nice website in German language with information about the Canary Islands, so be sure to check it out!
Another new kind Italian user, Mariano Verrone, from the beautiful city of Naples, reported me a very small bug related to the variants description of the German 2 Euro coin, year 2002, Mint mark A. The little bug has already been fixed and the fix will be included in the next release of Ecpc, but for those of you who can’t wait, feel free to contact me and I’ll send you the updated executable.
Yesterday I did some swapping with a friend and Ecpc betatester, Stefano Gevinti, so now I’ve uploaded his collection and my updated swap list in the swapping page.

I’m happy to announce that Ecpc got its first award for its quality from Softonic.com, the biggest Spanish speaking website offering shareware, freeware and commercial software for multiple platforms including Pocket PCs. You can see the Ecpc page right here, along with the nice icon that means “Excelente! ¡MB!¡MB! : Destaca entre los que son muy buenos, dentro de su clase son esenciales.”
Also Ecpc has been listed in the Italian Solopalmari.com.
Both websites have been added to the Links page along with two important new ones, Pocket.ws a German Pocket PC portal who recently published a new about Ecpc, and Pocket PC Soft, who listed the program in its Sport and Hobbies section.
So far so good, but there’s much more to come!

Today, after I’ve returned from a nice mountain trip to the nearby Corni di Canzo, I was extremely pleased to know about the victory of Schumacher’s Ferrari at the Monza Formula 1 Grand Prix, and I’d like to celebrate it by showing a picture I took many years ago when I had the chance to attend to the Monza Grand Prix.
It was an exciting emotion as the cars passed away in front of me in full acceleration just after the Ascari variant.
I’m not too sure about who the Ferrari pilots were that year, but I’m sure the cars had the numbers 1 (in the picture) and 2. If some expert among you knows it, please drop me a line.
I also enjoyed reading the funny comments which followed the announcement of the Ecpc updated version 1.1 on Aximsite, right here.

As you can see in the top left of each page I’ve just updated the links to the translations by adding some little flags and also fixed the incorrect Google translations links in the FAQ page.
The few lucky owners of the Special Edition of Ecpc will be very pleased to look at a whole new customization feature that will make their Special Edition even more unique and valuable. In fact I’ve added the possibility to choose a customized background texture to use as the skin for all the menus of the program.
Take a look at the new screenshots in the Special Edition section to see some interesting results with the custom skins.
Remember that the Special Edition is only for people who can help me in a number of ways, first of all with the translations.

Thanks to Marco Cadenazzi, an Italian friend who is just returned from Spain and translated in Spanish my press release and the product details page, Ecpc is now is available on Handango en Español here.
At the beginning of this week I struggled with a failed hardware upgrade attempt on my PC. I tried to install a brand new Athlon XP 2200 on my Asus A7V133 motherboard. I did expected some problems, but I tried it anyway and for a couple of days I feared my dear motherboard was gone…
That problem delayed my work schedule for this week, but now things are back to normal and who already purchased the first version of Ecpc is getting the updated Full version 1.1.
Oh, and after hearing about my PC disaster a couple of friends told me: get a Mac!